Saturday, November 16, 2013

global weirding

I spent a few hours Thursday afternoon shoveling. I
shoveled the path to the outhouse, and then the gravel pad around my cabin. If you
don’t keep on it, you just delay spring. This year, my driveway was covered in
snow till mid-May.

The night before, a storm blew in from the Bering Sea,
bringing 70 mile-an-hour gusts and near-record warm temperatures. Before the
storm, or maybe with the storm, it drizzled freezing rain, snowed, and then
rained, so when the wind came Wednesday night, it shook clumps of heavy, wet
snow from the trees. Several times the sound made me think someone had come to
my door. When huge sheets of snow slid from my roof and hit the ground, the
whole cabin shook.

In my loft, I cracked the window open – it was 40 degrees,
which felt tropical – and listened to the wind in the trees and the occasional
crack of trunk or limb. The light flicked off and on. I did not sleep well.

In the morning, the power was out. I lit a few candles and a
kerosene lantern and made coffee on the wood stove, opening another window so I wouldn’t overheat. My phone’s battery was half-full. I checked on my
chickens (at my friend Ian’s house down the street) to make sure their water
wouldn’t freeze, but it was 30 degrees outside and warmer in the coop.

Aside from electronics, my only concern was a thawing
freezer. When I got my first caribou, six years ago, it was mid-October and I
just kept the meat in a plastic tub outside. But that wouldn’t have worked this
year. After an early snow in September, we had record highs in October, and now, in mid-November, it was 40 degrees. The normal high this time of year is 11.

My friends Trystan and Mareca arrived (Trystan lives across
the street) and started shoveling his drive. Mareca said she felt bad for the
voles, who tunnel through the snow in the winter. She wondered if they’d be
able to get around now that the snow was saturated with rain. I hadn’t thought
of them, but had heard of caribou struggling to get at lichen after freezing
rain.

The power came on just after they left, a little after 10. My meat and fish would be fine.

Trystan had mentioned that some Bering Sea villages got hit
hard. My cell service (and hence Internet) worked fine, so I got online and
read the news. The News-Miner quoted Ed Plumb, of the National Weather Service,
talking about the ice grains and freezing drizzle in Fairbanks on Wednesday morning. None of the
meteorologists had seen anything like it; the air temperature was 10 degrees and freezing drizzle was falling.
What made it really weird, Plumb said, was that there were no above-freezing
temperatures anywhere in the atmosphere.

Wednesday evening, the temperature had jumped 20 degrees in an hour and a half.

There were unofficial reports of lightening.

Flights were cancelled.

Schools were closed Wednesday and again Thursday. The
Fairbanks district hadn’t had a snow day for decades until the Icepocalypse, in
2010, when more than half an inch of rain fell the week of Thanksgiving and school
was canceled for three days. Now we had two more days.

The news from the Bering Sea was even worse. “The town was actually
a part of the ocean,” Thomas Sinka, the mayor of Kotlik, told the Alaska Dispatch. Water and ice flooded the village and knocked out connections between
houses and the above-ground water and sewer system. Freezers were flooded, contaminated
with diesel and sewage. Food was ruined at the store.

Health providers were
flying in bottled water, disinfectants, and vaccines. If they can't fix the water and sewer systems, people will be hauling water and pooping in buckets all winter.

One story quoted Michael Kutz of the National
Weather Service saying warm water in the Bering Sea had kept sea ice from
forming – and protecting the coast – as it normally does this time of year. Sinka
said even some of the elders hadn’t seen a storm this bad. The first surge came on Saturday; the second hit on
Wednesday.

I thought about guys I met in Barrow years ago talking about
ice cellars (used to store whale and other meat) filling with water as the
permafrost thawed.

I read an op-ed by an Australian woman about increased wildfires there, and a new flood of jellyfish in the water around Sydney.

On
Facebook, I learned I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept well.

I went outside. It looked like it was snowing lightly, but it felt like rain. It
was 29 degrees.

There was about 10 inches of snow on the roof of my
woodshed, probably saturated with rain. I figured the rough-cut rafters could
handle it, but it made me wonder. I know there are tables somewhere that
calculate snow load and framing needs based on roof pitch and location. In
Valdez, you need to plan for big dumps of wet snow; in Fairbanks, the snow is
usually light. I know there are numbers for floods and winds, too.

I shoveled in a t-shirt, heaving shovelfuls off the edge of
my gravel pad. The snow was thick and hard where it had slid from my roof, and I
wondered if my shovel – the perfect shovel, I thought, for Fairbanks – was up
to the task. I could buy a new shovel, but that’s not the point. The point is
that lately it seems like we’re not living in the world we used to live in.

On a philosophical level, it seems like a damn waste. I
think there’s something beautiful about an object ideally suited to its job. A
canoe perfectly suited to a river. A house built just right for the seasons.
They reflect the knowledge and care of the maker. Houses are built the way they
are because that’s what works; ideally, the process reflects hundreds of years
of trial and error. People learn to travel, hunt, and fish by deeply
understanding the world around them. Plants and animals “learn” to survive in a
given environment. Change that environment too much and all that knowledge
becomes useless.

On a practical level, it’s dangerous. Houses flood and fail
when they’re not built for new conditions. People die when river ice doesn’t behave
like it used to.

When I went after caribou this fall, just north of the
Brooks Range, it was windy and warm. We didn’t find any animals. Driving back
down the Dalton, I nearly slid off the road near Coldfoot. At Finger Mountain, we waited
through the night where a truck blocked the road. Normally the road would be
frozen hard by mid-October, but the warm weather had made it slick. The trucker
got halfway up the hill. When he stopped to put on chains, the parked truck
slid off the road. It was a tanker full of diesel, and fully half its wheels
were hanging in midair off the shoulder. Some of the other truckers and hunters were
surprised it hadn’t split in half.

Snow coming off my roof had nearly buried my snowmachine,
which was already covered in ice. I shoveled it out and fired it up, chipping
ice off the cowling as it warmed. I did the same with my truck, using my ice
scraper on the roof. I shoveled around my parking spot and hoped my neighbor
with a plow would help with the drive.

This whole year has been weird weatherwise. Winter
was long, with snow into May. The Tanana River ice didn’t go out till May 20,
the latest date in 97 years of record-keeping. Then the summer was hot
and dry, with a record number of 80-degree days in Fairbanks.

It was Thomas
Friedman who coined (or at least popularized) the term “global weirding.” He
was trying to convey that global warming wouldn’t just make the planet a degree
or two warmer; it would make the weather weirder. Thinking about Kotlik,
weirding – or warming, or change, for that matter – seemed quaint and outdated.
Maybe we need a new word.

Daylight faded away. I put on my headlamp and kept shoveling. The temperature dropped. I put on a sweatshirt. I checked the birds again,
reset the timer on their light, and walked back with my cold hands wrapped
around warm eggs. My neighbor came and plowed my drive, turning down an offer
of beer.

I finished shoveling and went inside. Someone on the radio
announced that schools would be closed again on Friday; a truck was
partially blocking the Dalton Highway.

And that was just a mic break. Alaska News Nightly was surreal.

The first story was about the Bering Sea villages.
Two-thirds of Kotlik’s water and sewer system was shut down and a good part of
the village was staying at the high school. Flooding in Stebbins had left
several houses uninhabitable. Water had breached a seawall in Teller and washed
away hundreds of yards of beach. Shishmaref was preparing for another surge that
night.

Then Fairbanks. Thirteen thousand households had lost power
– from falling trees, blown fuses, and broken crossarms – and many still didn’t
have it back. It hit 44 degrees Wednesday (one degree shy of the record); a quarter inch of rain fell, along with five inches of snow.

After that, a hay shortage. Late planting and a hot summer had resulted in low yields. Straw is selling at double last year’s prices. Farmers are
slaughtering or giving away livestock; mushers are straining at the cost of
straw bedding for their dogs.

The next story was about a study correlating high latitudes
with high suicide rates.

I turned off the radio and rode my snowmachine down the hill
to get some beer. Small trees were littered across the side of the road. I
nearly bogged down in the heavy snow, then bounced over piles that had already set
up.

On Friday morning, it was five degrees. According to the
News-Miner, 3,000 households still didn’t have power, putting them at risk of
frozen pipes. Every store in town had sold out of generators, and the electric utility had
hired every lineman available. Fred Meyer was throwing out perishable
food.

2 comments:

UPDATE: Thanks to Emily Schwing (and Rick Thoman) for adding some perspective on this! In Schwing's story on KUAC (http://fm.kuac.org/post/historical-records-provide-few-clues-explain-winter-rain-storms), Thoman, of the National Weather Service, explains that it's rained even more in Fairbanks in winters past -- in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s. My post certainly implied this was a result of climate change. Now that seems a weak claim, although it shouldn't change anyone's understanding that Alaska's climate is changing. It's a common claim, and true as far as I know, that Alaska and the Arctic are warming faster than most places. But I'm pretty sure Alaska's climate is also more heavily affected than other places' by a semi-regular climate shift called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, similar to El Nino/La Nina but on a much longer time scale. Basically there are "warm" and "cool" periods, shifting every 20-30 years. The story doesn't mention the PDO, but Thoman does say the rains don't correlate well with north Pacific ocean temperatures, upon which the PDO is based. So it seems winter rain in Fairbanks remains somewhat a mystery.

Global Warming Times is an international news aggregator for Global Warming News and Record Heat and climate change news. We will provide you all latest Global Weirding News and all other update and change in our climateGlobal Weirding News